Wrong color settings, assigning wrong color profiles

"And now comes a related question: is it very wrong to intentionally assign wrong profiles to images for creative purposes? For example, you have some sRGB images that look a bit dull, so you assign them the Adobe RGB profile, so that they look more vivid."

It's not wrong, it can be part of a creative process. In fact Joseph Holmes the fine landscape photographer makes and sells working spaces with 'nested' variants - the purpose being to assign those to add or remove stauration. Over my career I've found those to be super useful

p.s. its not setting Adobe RGB that’s the issue, it's opening untagged files and ignoring the fact.

If we are set to Adobe RGB and an untagged sRGB file arrives there should be a warning if colour settings are set up right. My advice would be for the user to ignore the warning dialog's options, simply open, view and now consider assigning a different ICC profile (such as sRGB) to see if it corrects the appearance.

Of couse ALL of this relies on good display calibration and profiling 

I hope this helps
neil barstow, colourmanagement net :: adobe forum volunteer:: co-author: 'getting colour right'
google me "neil barstow colourmanagement" for lots of free articles on colour management

@TheDigitalDog  and @Bob_Hallam, thanks for your explanations. But you seem to be pro photographers (or something along those lines) and you know exactly what are you doing. Most people (including me) do not (fully) understand all this.

So to put it in layman's terms: should I also set my color management to Adobe RGB or not?

Now it is set to sRGB as a 'safe choice'. Most of the content that I work with is identified by the apps as sRGB (or in case it is not tagged, the safest bet is that it is sRGB). I do not work with super-duper photographers and RAW files, that's too deep for me.

I'm into prepress (books and stuff). I'm not a super-pro, but it works. If the color management is set to sRGB and the content is not tagged, it will be displayed "through the prism" of sRGB. I guess that's the "right prism" in this case. sRGB will also be set as a source profile for conversion to CMYK.

So you have images originally created with sRGB in mind, they are displayed as sRGB and they convert from sRGB to the CMYK profile required by the printer. The situation is clear.

But if I set all the apps to Adobe RGB, then Adobe RGB will be a source profile for converting to CMYK and if that's wrong - the CMYK images will be wrong, cause they will be based on something wrong.

And this might also mislead someone that there's something "wrong" with the images and he might want to edit them in order to "fix them".

I hope you understand what I mean. There must be some kind of logic in this. But if there're no rules - then fine. I will set the color management to whatever pleases me visually, like Wide Gamut RGB or ProPhoto RGB, so my (originally sRGB) content will appear saturated and shiny and it will "look cool".

I understand that we can break some rules occassionally, but generally, I doubt that this is a good idea.

Sure, you can convert from one profile to another if necesary, but I think that the right term here would be assigning or maybe color-managing and that's something different.

It is not wrong at all.  ICC profiles are created and used for different purposes.  sRGB for internet use, and larger gamut profiles for printing.   The assigned and embedded profile provides the correct appearance for the file.  If you are the "artist" then the correct appearance is yours to decide.  When files are converted from Raw camera sensor information, the photographer makes many choices to determine how an image should appear.  Then those pixels are created in the color space or container profile.  If you choose a different one as in your example where you choose the larger gamut Adobe RGB instead of sRGB.  Just remember to convert it back to sRGB for internet use if that's how you want to use it.  That will preserve the color profile choice you made.  

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@sd5e8a wrote:

Some people claim that the color management in all of the Adobe apps should be set to Adobe RGB (1998), cause this profile has a wider color gamut and its for professionals.

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Who says such nonesense? Here's what I'd tell someone making such a statement: 

"All generalizations are false, including this one." -Mark Twain

And no, I find no usefulness for converting my raw data into Adobe RGB (1998), its gamut is too small for my needs. 

Outside color managed applications, sRGB is meaninless. The 'raw' RGB values, who's scale is unknown, is sent directly to the display. On an sRGB gamut display, that may look fine (but different for all users). On a wide gamut display, it will look awful. So sRGB without color management isn't useful. This is true of all RGB color spaces. 

No camera produces sRGB or Adobe RGB (1998). They all produce some raw data which has an undefined color space. They can use their proprietary processing (their internal raw converter if you will) to convert that into a JPEG that is either sRGB or Adobe RGB (1998). There isn't anything that stops the camera makers from producing any other RGB color space from the raw. 

Yes, it is fundementally wrong to intentionally assign the wrong color space. Just as if you asked me how tall I am and I said 6 meters instead of 6 feet. 

You have an sRGB image that looks 'dull': why? OK, it is one, you want to boost saturation 'blindly', there isn't harm in assinging it something else but that's mainly a solution in search of a problem. Is it dull because it isn't being color managed? That's a real issue. 

None of this has anything to do with accurate color. It has everything to do with pleasing color (desired color). Accurate color is often very ugly to view! 

http://www.color.org/scene-referred.xalter

As for "most images" on the web are sRGB, keep in mind it doesn't matter when the browser uses color management and there are millions upon millions of wide gamut displays using color management today.